How far does the apple fall? Offence type-similarity transmission between family members

• In Event: Intergenerational Criminology, Panel 1. Family and Intergenerational Perspectives

Abstract

One of the most common risk factors for criminal behavior is some form of familial offending. That is, and because most often investigated in terms of the parent-child relationship, if a person has an offending parent (or family member), they are more likely to commit crime themselves. In fact, from a recent meta-analysis by Besemer et al. (2017), they are almost double at risk of offending if their parent has committed a crime, even after accounting for other variables. This is not surprising given the array of mechanisms put forward in various theories from social learning to biological. While many of these studies, as outlined above, only analyse intergenerational or parental transmission of offending, they also often analyse crime as a single entity. In other words, do criminal parents give rise to criminal children? In this analysis, data from Norway is used to investigate to what extent different types of offending in different family members impact on the other family member’s offending choices. For examples, does a burglar parent influence them to commit burglary or does a violent criminal sibling affect them to also commit violence? To do this, a longitudinal model of offending is employed. For one, to account for the temporal ordering of offences from one family member to another. Second, to expose any periods of crime specialization in the family members which may no longer exist as they age and have become involved in a greater variety of offences. Lastly, so time-varying constants can be introduced to try and account for any general trends (e.g., in the types or seriousness of offences) as the focal offender ages.

Author

• Michael James Frith, University i Oslo